On February 22, the South Sudan Council of Ministers passed the USAID-assisted draft Land Policy with minimal amendments. The Land Policy will now head to the National Legislative Assembly for review. While much work remains to be done, this event marks a notable step on South Sudan’s path toward developing institutions and policies for effective land governance.
Artisanal mining – a livelihood for an estimated 20 million people around the world – has historically not been an area where USAID and other donors have invested substantial resources. While a wide range of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) practices occur throughout the world, the exploration, extraction and trade of diamonds have become increasingly viewed as controversial due to purported links with rebel movements, environmental destruction, and child labor.
Near the end of January, Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf called attention to “the need for major reform of our land and natural resource governance systems” in her annual message to the national legislature.
This video from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) profiles a project relating to secure access to land and resource rights in Mozambique. The 19 minute film is narrated mostly in Portuguese with English subtitles.
This research paper from USAID calls attention to the challenges faced by vulnerable populations with respect to land. The paper identifies five vulnerable groups who have weak claims on land rights and are particularly vulnerable to changes in land tenure systems and property rights reform:
Women
Households that have been directly affected by HIV/AIDS
Pastoralist communities
Indigenous populations
As the USAID Land Reform Project in Tajikistan comes to a close this month, there has been an increase in publicity for its achievements. An article highlighting a recent event to celebrate the project’s accomplishments and the work of the Tajik government in advancing land reform was featured in local media and a Feed the Future press release. Feed the Future is the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative.
According to AllAfrica.com, Liberia’s Inquirer newspaper recently honored Philomena Bloh Sayeh as 2012 Director General of the Year. Ms. Sayeh is the Director General of Liberia’s Center for National Documents and Records Agency (CNDRA) and is a key partner in USAID’s Land Policy and Institutional Support (LPIS) project. This award recognizes the ambitious reform efforts that Ms. Sayeh, with the support of USAID, has overseen at CNDRA during the past year.
IFPRI has just published a new paper that considers whether or not policy changes related to gender equality and women’s empowerment in Ethiopia are, or are not, mutually reinforcing. One set of changes involves certification of land use rights at the community level. See here for a discussion of USAID’s project supporting these efforts. Certification allows husbands and wives to be listed as joint holders of the rights (these rights are inheritable by the remaining spouse when the other spouse dies).
This article focuses on recent policy changes implemented by the Government of Tanzania. The Government has been criticized in local and international media for supporting harmful large-scale land acquisitions. In response, policy makers have placed a cap on transfer size: investors can acquire no more than 10,000 hectares for sugar production and no more than 5,000 hectares for rice production (two key agricultural commodities in the country). But will a cap stop harmful transfers? Maybe, but caps are not necessarily the “major step” that the article suggests.
According to a recent article from Reuters AlertNet, land is the first issue on the agenda at the historic peace talks in Cuba between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Unequal land distribution is a factor in Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict. If the current peace negotiations are to succeed and Colombia is to achieve enduring peace and stability, land issues must be addressed.
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